How do search engines work?

How do search engine work

Your business depends heavily on visibility in search engines. You have to try to understand this thing that has a great influence on your success.

But it's really confusing to figure out how search engines work. Not just you will.

The entire industry is trying to understand the reasons for website rankings, and even the information we know is constantly changing.

We can't provide a detailed outline of how Google’s algorithms work for you (no one can), but we can provide some basic information about how search engines work, which may help eliminate some mysteries. Here are some main things you should know.

Search engine goals

The first thing to understand about how a search engine works is that the first task of a search engine is to provide the best possible results for what the searcher is looking for.

Speaking of natural results, search engines do n’t care how much a website ’s owner wants to seize those hot spots or think you deserve it — they only care about people who search.

By providing the information people need, search engines can ensure that these people can return to using the site again. We know how effective this is for Google-many of us use it every day.

This primary goal leads to the secondary goal of generating company profits: making money through advertising. Businesses spend money advertising on search engines, largely because they know that a large number of people use search engines every day. As long as Google makes users satisfied and returns to the site, advertisers will continue to make the company profitable.

Therefore, the main focus of the search engine is how to ensure that the results it provides provide the most useful information for consumer queries. This is where things start to get complicated.

Search engine index

In order for a search engine to find the correct web page for every possible query (or as close as possible to such a noble goal), it must record all possible web pages online and understand the content on each web page. To this end, search engines have created a large number of web page indexes.

The index attempts to identify and organize each website and webpage on the network so that it can establish a connection between the keywords people search for and the content contained on each webpage.

Most importantly, it needs to be able to assign a relative quality to different web pages covering the same subject. This is tricky because all this happens on the machine. It is difficult for people to agree on the composition of "high-quality" content, but search engines must determine it based on factors that the machine can objectively measure.

Web Crawler

The first challenge in creating a search engine index is to identify all web pages.

This part of the work is the responsibility of the website crawler. Every time a web crawler finds a page, it crawls that page and collects all relevant information needed for the search engine index. After adding the page to the index, it will use each link on the page to find a new page to crawl.

Website owners can speed up the process of crawling websites by submitting site maps and using internal links. This is the simplest part.

Search Engine Algorithm

The second challenge of search engine indexing is much more complicated: assign relative values ​​to all web pages.

If a website crawler finds 100,000 pages containing content that it considers relevant to a specific term, how does a search engine decide in which order to display these results?

This is where search engine algorithms come into play. Engineers at every large search engine company have spent countless hours developing a complex algorithm that uses many factors to allocate the relative value of websites and web pages.

Ranking Factor

Although there are many different factors that can be used to determine why one page is ranked above another-much more than we can generalize here, and even more than the greatest SEO experts know-but We know some of the most important search engine ranking factors considered by Google and other search engines:

Links-Links are the most important ranking factor, especially external links (those links from one website to another) because whenever another website links to your website, it will send Google a link on the page. A signal of authority or something of value. When a web page with many other sites linking to it links to another site, the link is even more valuable because the site already has a high degree of authority. Although everything else on this list is important, many factors that determine to rank are based on the quantity and quality of links to the site.

Website age-Old websites are generally considered more trustworthy and authoritative than new websites.

Keywords—Search engines always try to provide the most relevant results, so they look for terms related to the searcher ’s query on the page. The more relevant keywords you use, the more signals it sends to search engines, indicating that your content is relevant.

Mobile usability-Google has always used mobile usability as a ranking factor. If your website works well on the desktop but has never been optimized for mobile apps, then it may hurt your ranking.

Page speed-People don't have so much patience, and do so search engines. Pages that load slowly will, therefore, rank lower.

Behavior data-Google will track people's behavior after entering the search engine results page (SERP). If someone clicks on a page and immediately pops up-it is a signal that this page does not provide what they want. On the contrary, if they stay on the page for a while, or even click on different pages on the site, then this shows Google the value of the site.


Google and other search engines have provided some information about the ranking factors they use, but they usually remain silent about how their search engine algorithms work. They don't want people trying to manipulate the results-this has always been a problem for black hat SEO practitioners.

Search Engine Optimization

Although we have a lot of unclear things about how the search algorithm works, everything we know has become the basis of the entire search engine optimization field. SEO is competitive, and you can do very limited things. You can get the rankings you want most by searching for keywords related to your business, but you still have a lot of things to control and a lot of things to do. Do it.

Related Reading: SEO everything you need to know.